


Familiar Like My Mirror

by dietplainlite



Series: From Eden [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fugitives, Homecoming, Reylo - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 01:03:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15830553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dietplainlite/pseuds/dietplainlite
Summary: A follow up to In the Lowland Plot finds Rey and Ben back in his childhood home, faced with stark reminders of who he was and what he gave up.





	Familiar Like My Mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kyriadamorte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyriadamorte/gifts).



The house on Chandrila is small. Smaller than he imagined it, and smaller than anyone would have imagined for a Senator--much less a former princess of Alderaan--to have chosen to raise her family.

Two bedrooms, lounge, kitchen, ‘fresher. These rooms encompassed his entire world for the first years of his life, along with sporadic trips on the Millennium Falcon and his mother’s ship.

It’s been empty ever since the seat of the New Republic government moved to Hosnian Prime, but his mother kept it, as she’s kept properties scattered all over the galaxy, never knowing when she or someone else would need of a place to hide, rest, or recuperate.

Rey and Ben Solo are here primarily to hide, but rest and recuperation are in order as well.

They’d arrived at Empress Teta to discover the planet under a massive First Order blockade.  They didn’t stick around long enough to find the reason, and the ship suffered damage in the time it took to set new lightspeed coordinates. They hopped around until the situation became urgent and ended up on Jakku to make repairs. They arrived at the outpost late in the morning, when most of the scavengers would still be out in the field. Rey’s old master was long gone, and the new person in charge was more interested in their credits than getting a good look at their faces.

They’d flown to Chandrila as soon as the repairs had been made, and now Rey stands in the doorway of his childhood kitchen, looking around in much the same way he’d looked around what was left of her makeshift shelter in a toppled AT-AT on Jakku.

If she’s more quiet than usual, more pensive, he prays it’s because of fatigue, and not the argument they’d had, or what came after.

“What are these?” she asks, running her fingers over the marks on the doorframe. He steps closer.

“My height,” he answers, voice cracking. They haven’t spoken many words to each other since leaving Jakku. He clears his throat. “They recorded it every year or tried to. On my birthday.”

“Oh,” she says, pain flashing across her face as she looks away.

His mother told him that her parents had done the same thing with her, until she was sixteen and it was apparent she wasn’t growing any taller.  He runs his thumb along the place where she’d marked her height, and the mark for his father’s height.  

Rey had marked the passage of time as well, but Ben’s marks had a destination, climbing steadily upward, ending just below his father’s, the day he’d gone away with Luke. They’re made with different implements, written in different hands.  Rey’s marks never varied. There was no significance to any of them. Nothing to denote that any day was different from the last. They may as well have been the footprints of a soldier marching in place.

“It’s not dusty at all, here,” she says. Her old walker had been full of sand drifts, even though she’d left it less than two weeks before. She told him they were fortunate it hadn’t been lost completely in a storm.

“The droids maintain it,” he says.

“They’re here still, even though no one else is?”

“What’s the alternative? Selling them or kicking them out? Maybe leaving them deactivated until they’re needed again?”

“You’re right. I’m just…tired.”

Tired and angry. Still very angry with him and being here is not helping. He thinks it might have been easier for her to bear if this apartment had been lavish. The kind of childhood her mother had was beyond even Rey’s wildest dreams. But the ordinariness of this house highlights her deprivation in a way that gilt and mirrors and velvet never could.

“Would you like to go to sleep?” he asks.

“Are the droids here, now?”

“I sent a message, using my mother’s code, had them picked up for routine maintenance.”

He steers her into the master bedroom. She might break down completely if she gets a glimpse of his room, even if it no longer holds all his star charts and model ships.

His parents’ old room has been stripped of all ornament, but there are linens in the dresser drawer, and as he shakes them out, they release a dim scent of the rose water the droids used in the laundry. His mother is all about small luxuries.

Rey takes the sheet and a thin quilt and tells him she’ll take care of making the bed. He leaves her to it, knowing she’ll make a pallet on the floor rather than sleep in the large, too-soft bed.

He goes back through the living room and looks at the kitchen door. The first mark commemorates his first steps, according to his mother. Early, at ten months, and he’d developed into an expert escape artist before his first birthday. Elsie, his mother’s protocol droid, loved to tell the story of how she’d opened the door one day to find a young Twi’lek man holding a naked Ben Solo, straight armed and nervously asking, “Is this yours?” She had left the fully clothed toddler playing in his room less than ten minutes earlier while she prepared a snack.

The marks occur every few months until his fifth birthday, when they begin to recur annually. He remembers his mother that day, kneeling before him with tears in her eyes, asking where the time went, sad that she wasn’t her baby anymore. He’d assured her he would always be her baby, but secretly, he hadn’t felt like a baby in a long time.

Age seven, a lucky number on Chandrilla, so the celebration of the Galactic Concordance had been extravagant. His mother was at one event or another every day and night, but she refused all official duties on the actual day, spending it with him at the carnival, taking him away from the crowds for an all-dessert dinner. She did use her influence to get them prime seats for the fireworks and light show—a holographic reenactment of the Battle of Jakku—and didn’t make too much of a fuss when he covered his eyes during the scary parts, merely telling him they could leave whenever he wanted.

He stops and closes his eyes. He hasn’t thought of these things in years, and the memories are usually accompanied by pain and rage, always with an emphasis on the imperfections of the day. How she was busy every other day that week. How people kept interrupting their conversation to talk to her. How his father had been away on an urgent humanitarian mission.

Remembering the good things, and how much they outweighed the bad, sends a shudder of revulsion through his body at his foolishness.

Opening his eyes again, he touches the mark at age ten. Nothing too significant on his birthday. Everyone was there, even Luke and Chewbacca, but it was the usual sweets and punch. But that year, that was the year his powers, latent and subtle for so long that everyone assumed he’d be an intuitive Force user like his mother, had roared to life.  The same year Rey had been born.

Snoke would have had them believe that Rey’s abilities were an answer to his own, as though the Force had chosen that infant to be as powerful as him. They’ll never know for sure, because Rey doesn’t know the date of her birth, but Ben would stake his life that his powers had fully manifested on the day she had winked into existence.

Eleven, when Leia finally relented to letting him learn to fly. Han and Ben went along with it even though he’d been learning since he could sit in his dad’s lap and see over the console and had flown the Falcon solo when he was eight.

Thirteen, when he’d become a man in the traditions of Alderaan, already several inches taller than his mother.

Fifteen, an inch shorter than his father, his desperate attempts to control his powers in vain and his worst fears coming true. Looking back at this, without the fog of his pain, it’s clear how much they loved him, how much they wanted him to be able to stay. How they longed for a quick return.

It’s the final mark. He hasn’t set foot in this house since that day.

“You were so lucky,” Rey says. He turns to find her leaning against the hallway arch. Despite her red eyes and nose, it’s not an accusation, not like before.

She’d wanted to use their powers to free the remaining indentured workers at Niima Outpost. They’d argued about it. He pointed out how dangerous it would be to risk drawing attention to themselves and she’d countered by saying that freeing even one enslaved person was worth the risk. She accused him of learning nothing, of still being an ungrateful brat. She made him look around at her pathetic former home, at the marks on the wall, at her sad attempts at a life, and when he’d still refused to help she left, nearly ripping the door off its hinges in her anger.

He assumed she went to cool off, but she returned hours later, still angry but triumphant. She had used her powers to coerce the new master into divvying up the portions equally to all the scavengers, even the ones who couldn’t work, before leaving the planet for good.

They’d fought about it again, fiercely. He called her a fool, asking what would happen when another tyrant took over, or when the portions ran out, or when people who worked all day questioned why they didn’t have more than those who didn’t.

“They have enough food in their bellies today and believe me when you live like this that’s all that matters.”

“You know it’s not, otherwise you’d have eaten everything you had the moment you got it.  These things take time and planning. You’re so much like my mother it’s ridiculous.”

“Good! At least one of us is like her!”

“She’s not your mother and she never will be,” he flung back at her.

The next few minutes were a blur as she flew at him, a wild blur of fists and kicks and teeth. As an apprentice, he’d sparred with smaller students in hand to hand combat as well as with sabers, and his goal had always been to keep them from getting hurt. Much like his first fight with Rey, this is Ben’s instinct, until, once again, he was faced with the realization that this smaller, less experienced opponent might just kill him.

And then she had him pinned against the wall, the one documenting her fruitless hopes and dreams, a shard of rusty metal pressed against his throat, sand in her hair and murder in her eyes.

He licked his lips, preparing to plead with her, when she growled, threw her weapon aside and kissed him.

“Rey,” he whispered, when she pulled away.

“Shut up,” she hissed, moving in again.

He shut up and spun her around, pressing her into the wall and freeing her from her clothes.

She wouldn’t let him inside her this time, so he’d used his fingers and mouth on her and she’d worked him with her hand.

It was over sooner than their fight had been, his seed splashed on her belly and his mouth slick with her.

“We’d better leave,” she said. “There’s nothing left here.”

She moves to his side now, careful to keep space between them, but as always, something crackles in the very air around them.

“Don’t you want to sleep?” he asks.

“I do.”

“Is there something wrong? Giant spider hanging from the ceiling? Loth cats nesting in the closet?”

She presses her lips together as she shakes her head.

“Are you hungry?”

“Always, but…come on.” She takes his hand, pulling him back through the lounge, into his parents’ room and out onto the balcony, where she’s dragged every pillow and blanket and bedroll from the linen closet and created a nest in the corner. Flickering holoflames line the railing, casting violet shadows everywhere. Above, the stars are dense in the dark, clear sky.

“I didn’t get to sleep outside much, because the night is so dangerous on Jakku. Which was a shame because it’s so dark that the sky is practically white with stars. And I don’t know how long it’s been since you had just gotten to look up.” Finished with her speech, she looks away.

“I’m really tired all of a sudden,” he says, collapsing into the nest. She joins him, putting a person’s worth of space between them.

They lay on their backs, pointing out star systems and constellations to each other and studiously avoiding the cluster of fire and dust where the Hosnian System used to be.

She rolls over to face him. “Where are we going next?”

“I don’t know, but we can’t stay here long.”

“Have you thought anymore about—”

“Yes. But I can’t. Not yet. If you need to go back—”

“Not without you.”

He turns his face from the night sky to look at her. Her face is half shadowed, but the holoflames cast dappled light on her cheek and brow and hair.

“The longer I wait to be ready, the worse things will get. Maybe I’ll never be ready. Maybe I’m just afraid.”

“Sleep on it,” she whispers, reaching out.

He meets her in the middle.

They don’t sleep until the sky turns gray.

In the morning, his choice is unspoken but clear.  She contacts the Resistance to arrange a rendezvous.

“They’re coming here. Well, Chewbacca is. No one else knows yet except your mother. We’ll figure out a plan when he arrives.”

From the balcony, he looks out over the park land, to a glimpse of the ocean beyond. Recalls his father telling him some old story about Correllian pirates on the high seas, back when they built ocean crafts rather than space ships. Ben drew pictures of the stories, with Han and Chewie as Captain and First Mate, and Leia as the Pirate Queen.

Moving toward a brighter future means facing the bright spots in his past he’s ignored for too long. He may not be up to the task.

She joins him at the railing. Tells him that no matter where she goes, she can’t get enough of looking at green things.

It hurts when she says things like this, but he’s going to have to get used to it. Her life is what it is. It is not an indictment of his.

“When’s the last time you saw Chewie?”

“You mean before he shot me?”

“Yes,” she says, not taking the bait.

“I don’t really know. After I left home.”

He does know. His parents weren’t there. He came to visit while they were setting up the temple, along with a few friends to help with construction. He also brought a few of Ben’s favorite snacks. At the time, his father’s oldest friend seemed to be the only person who didn’t treat him any differently.

“I don’t know if I can face him.”

Rey hesitates, looking as though she’s going to speak, but slips her hand in his instead. She pulls him away, and as always, he follows her, this time into the kitchen. Pushing him against the door frame, she searches her pockets and finds a tiny knife.

“What are you doing?”

“Hold still and stand up straight,” she says, pressing herself against him and standing on her toes.  He obeys, and she reaches above his head with the knife. He tries to look up, but she pulls his chin down with her other hand. “I said, hold still.” 

She sticks her tongue out and squints as she makes a horizontal gouge above his head, then ruffles his hair to get rid of any paint debris.

“There,” she says, turning him around. The mark is long and deep, nearly at the top of the frame. “You’re never getting any taller. You might even shrink a little if you manage to reach old age. But you’re grown, and you’ve got to start acting like it or you may as well just leave here and keep wandering.”

He touches the groove. She’s carved it deep, and she’s right.

It doesn’t matter whether he thinks he can face the things he’s done. He simply must.

He takes her hand again, pulls her close, leaning against the doorframe. Her arms circle his back as she hides her face in his chest.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says. “One day.”

“I know.”

In this one moment, at least, it’s true.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "From Eden" by Hozier


End file.
